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Google announce Melange project for open source collaboration

Google has announced the Melange project, which aims to be an open collaboration platform, inspired by the work flows from Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contests. Melange will be a combination of content management, issue tracking and customer relationship system, but focussed on introducing college students to open source projects and bringing them into the open source community.

GSoC is a contest which offers stipends to university students to work on open source projects and has been running since 2005. GHOP is a similar contest but aimed at pre-university students. Both contests incorporate mentoring of the students by members of the open source community.

GSoC and GHOP already have applications to manage interaction between participants, but these applications run on systems within Google's infrastructure and are developed solely by them. With Melange, Google aims to move the process into the open, firstly by developing Melange as an open source project and secondly, by hosting Melange on the Google App Engine.

The project name is inspired, according to Google Program Manager Leslie Hawthorne, by Frank Herbert's Dune novels; "We need to make a system that is useful as a method of interaction, DiBona ", Google's Open Source Program Manager, "came up with the name. It's Melange as in the spice of creation."